Theatre Y Presents The End of Reality – Preview

A spokesperson describes the event as follows:

“...THE END OF REALITY examines the numbing of the American psyche as it seeks to insulate itself from the ambient brutalities of contemporary life.
Known for his subversive interrogation of realist aesthetics, Maxwell’s script blurs the mundane and the existential in an urgent meditation on the “banality of violence and the true nature of security” (critic Georgia Kirtland). A ragtag crew of security guards protects a building from an imminent threat, wavering between vigilance and distraction. Their idleness digresses into on-the-job chatter that, in all of its inconsequence, expresses a searching need for authentic connection to something beyond themselves. Bouts of violence erupt without the glamour of spectacle; the unvarnished reality of violence is rendered awkward, routine, and vacuous for this security team. In such a precarious world, the politics of “protectionism” and “isolationism” assume personal, intimate dimensions.
In Theatre Y’s concept, the audience is the “object” of the security team’s protection, treated as if they have come to seek refuge from the menace of the outside world. The theater becomes a disorienting holding-pen in which actors and audience together wait out the danger. Director Melissa Lorraine invites vulnerability into this satire, and a feminine relationship to violence..."